April 2010

April 20, 2010

The resignation of India’s junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor amid allegations of impropriety over a cricket team franchise bid could adversely affect the country’s new diplomatic and economic push in Africa. For the record, Tharoor, a former United Nations under-secretary, has vigorously defended himself in India’s parliament and called for a thorough investigation of the charges because his “conscience is clear.”

I found this IANS story by friend and fellow journalist Manish Chand an interesting perspective on the larger consequence of the allegations, which the former minister himself described as “fanciful and malicious.”

By Manish Chand

New Delhi, April 19 (IANS) When Shashi Tharoor visited Liberia in September last year, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf broke protocol and attended a reception organised by the Liberian foreign minister in his honour. Next day, Johnson-Sirleaf invited Tharoor for a breakfast to her residence.

In barely ten months he served as India's junior foreign minister, Tharoor managed to forge personal equations with many African leaders and made a visible difference to India's diplomacy in Africa.

Tharoor's tryst with Africa goes back to his days as UN under secretary-general where he developed rapport with scores of African bureaucrats and ministers. Not surprisingly, he brought a personal touch to his dealings with Africans. The Egyptian foreign minister, for example, is on twitter with him, recalls a close aide. Many foreign ministers from African countries send SMSes to him and speak to him frequently over the telephone.

To make his African guests feel welcome in India, Tharoor would not only hold the mandatory lunch at Hyderabad House for visiting dignitaries, but also add an event or two like an address at the Indian Council for World Affairs (ICWA) to give them a broader exposure to India.

Tharoor stepped inside South Block at a time when India was raising its diplomatic and economic profile in the resource-rich African continent after years of neglect. China, on the other hand, has scaled up its bilateral trade with Africa to $109 billion, compared to India-Africa trade of a mere $39 billion.

Against this backdrop, Tharoor imparted a fresh vigour to India's African diplomacy and travelled to Liberia within months of becoming junior foreign minister.

The French-speaking Tharoor also struck a chord with diplomats and ministers from Francophone countries of West Africa, a region whose importance India has woken up to only recently. At the CII-Exim Bank India-Africa business conclave held here in March, Tharoor floored African leaders, specially from Francophone countries, when he ended his speech with greetings in French. Tharoor's success in Africa generated whisper campaign in some Chinese blogs where anonymous writers thought India was finally giving China tough competition in the continent.

But Tharoor wisely sensed the trap of getting into India-China rivalry in the African continent and defined India's distinctive agenda-free approach in his speech at the CII conclave, called "the Indian model of cooperation", which he said revolved around capacity building, trade and investments human resource development.

"We do not wish to go and demand certain rights or projects or impose our ideas in Africa. But we do want to contribute to the achievement of Africa's development objectives as they have been set by our African partners," Tharoor said. This approach has found enthusiastic response in Africa. In barely ten months in office as minister of state for external affairs, in charge of Africa, Latin America and West Asia, Tharoor visited five African countries, including Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Mozambique and Ethiopia. He also visited Haiti, Dominican Republic, Peru and Colombia in Latin America, and Bahrain, the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia in West Asia.

Had he survived the controversy surrounding his alleged link with Kochi's IPL bid that cost him his job, he would be heading on a whirlwind tour to Tanzania, Mali and Mauritania next month. Next month, he was also scheduled to go to Kuwait, Bahrain, Mexico, Brazil and Panama in quick succession.

April 18, 2010

The deadly earthquake in the Qinghai Province in northwestern China, which killed 1400, mostly Tibetan people, on April 14, offers an extraordinary opportunity to Beijing to allow the Dalai Lama to make his first visit home in over 50 years.

While the Dalai Lama has been quick to request that he be allowed to visit the province, China has not so much as even taken note of that suggestion. "This time the location of the earthquake, Kyigudo (Chinese: Yushu), lies in Qinghai Province, which happens to be where both the late Panchen Lama and I were born. To fulfill the wishes of many of the people there, I am eager to go there myself to offer them comfort," the Dalai Lama said in a statement. He had expressed a similar wish in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan which killed over 80,000 people.

Although some 800 km separate Takster in Amdo, where the Dalai Lama was born in 1935, and Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture where the earthquake hit, the tragedy has the potential to considerably narrow the distance between the two sides and begin dialogue at the highest level of the leaderships for the first time.

It is a measure how eager the Chinese leadership is to demonstrate that they care deeply about Tibet's well-being that both President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have become personally involved in the relief efforts. While Hu cut short his visit to Brazil, where he had gone to attend a summit meeting of the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) grouping along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Wen postponed his visit to Indonesia. That demonstration of Beijing's commitment to Tibet could acquire a historic dimension were it to invite the Dalai Lama to be among his people at the time of their desperate need.

The reflexively adversarial Chinese leadership can score some political and diplomatic points in allowing the Dalai Lama to visit the affected area, even if it is highly controlled. For his part, the Dalai Lama could use the visit to send a strong message of hope to the Tibetan people, generations of whom have grown up thinking of him only as a fabled figure since he was forced into exile in 1959.

Media reports suggest that it was the Buddhist monks who were out in force carrying out relief operations in the region which rises to the elevation of three miles or 15,000 feet and higher. The city of Yushu, also known as Kyigudo to the Tibetans, was reported to have been flattened by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake. Being an important city in the province, that is where the Chinese government has concentrated its relief efforts. The New York Times reported that the official relief operations were impressive with thousands of soldiers employed for the task. However, there were also reports of rising disaffection among the Tibetans outside the city who do not approve of the Han Chinese presence.

It is almost a foregone conclusion that Beijing will not entertain the Dalai Lama's proposed visit because in its assessment his presence is bound to be a serious distraction. In their strategic thinking, China is better off waiting out the Dalai Lama's death rather than giving him a chance to complicate the issue at this time. Even though at 75 the Dalai Lama remains in reasonably sound health, the Communist leadership is conscious that time is on the side of the Chinese state and not the person of the Tibetan leader. The leadership is bound to see the Dalai Lama's presence in Tibet for the first time in 51 years, and that too in the midst of a catastrophe, of this scale as fraught with possibilities of igniting a revolt among the Tibetan people.

Also, at the operational level of bilateral diplomacy it would be unrealistic for Beijing to let him visit and not choose to engage him a substantive dialogue over the future of Tibet. Not talking directly with the Dalai Lama has been a far more effective approach so far for China. Why should an earthquake change that?

For one, it could send a powerful symbolic message about China's sincerity in resolving the Tibetan question around the world. More importantly, it can have profound impact in the eventual peaceful integration of Tibet into the Chinese mainstream with the kind of autonomy demanded by the Dalai Lama.

April 17, 2010

While America is caught in the ideological ferment over which healthcare model to follow, The Economist has a special report on innovations in emerging markets that may hold some answers. The following are some excerpts from the series of special reports that concern healthcare.

“Devi Shetty is India’s most celebrated heart surgeon, having performed the country’s first neonatal heart surgery on a nine-day-old baby, and numbered Mother Teresa among his patients. Yet his most important contribution to medicine is not his surgical skill but his determination to make this huge industry more efficient by applying Henry Ford’s management principles. He believes that a combination of economies of scale and specialisation can radically reduce the cost of heart surgery. His flagship Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital in the “Electronics City” district of Bangalore, not far from GE, Infosys and Wipro, has 1,000 beds (against an average of 160 beds in American heart hospitals), and Dr Shetty and his team of 40-odd cardiologists perform about 600 operations a week.

The sheer number of patients allows surgeons to acquire world-class expertise in particular operations, and the generous backup facilities allow them to concentrate on their speciality rather than wasting their time on administration. Dr Shetty has performed more than 15,000 heart operations and other members of his team more than 10,000. The hospital charges an average of $2,000 for open-heart surgery, compared with $20,000-100,000 in America, but its success rates are as good as in the best American hospitals.

Dr Shetty has devoted much of his energy to boosting his customer base, largely for humanitarian reasons but also because he believes that higher volumes lead to better quality. He has established video and internet links with hospitals in India, Africa and Malaysia so that his surgeons can give expert advice to less experienced colleagues. He also sends “clinics on wheels” to nearby rural hospitals to test for heart disease. He has created a health-insurance scheme, working with various local self-help groups, that covers 2.5m people for a premium of about 11 cents a month each. About a third of the hospital’s patients are now enrolled in the scheme. A sliding scale of fees is used for operations so that richer customers subsidise poorer ones. The entire enterprise is surprisingly profitable given how many poor people it treats. Dr Shetty’s family-owned hospital group reports a 7.7% profit after taxes, compared with an average of 6.9% in American private hospitals.

The group has recently built three other hospitals next to the heart clinic—a trauma centre, a 1,400-bed cancer hospital and a 300-bed eye hospital. They all share central facilities such as laboratories and a blood bank. Dr Shetty is also setting up “medical cities” in other parts of the country. Over the next five years his company plans to increase its number of beds to 30,000, making it the largest private-hospital group in India and giving it more bargaining power when it negotiates with suppliers, thus driving down costs further.”

Incidentally, Dr. Shetty is bringing his model close to the United States by building a 2,000-bed hospital in the Cayman Islands, “a short flight from Miami, where he will offer surgery at half the price charged by American hospitals.”

April 16, 2010

It’s Friday and it’s time to be flippant. It is also time to indulge in some reckless deconstruction which has no basis in fact. No offense is meant and, I hope, none is taken.

There is this Palm Pre commercial which has become quite a hit for several reasons, not the least of which being Michelle Van Der Water, the model with a fetching and swaying attractiveness. Second equally important reason is the accompanying song which has the effervescence of the demographic it is trying to capture. The song is “Quiet Dog” by Mos Def. So far so good. It is all peppy, upbeat, cheerful, and hopeful. It is a terrific commercial.

When I first saw the commercial and heard the song, my ears perked up for all the wrong reasons. While it effectively captures the “Life moves fast” theme of the company, what grabbed my attention were two or three words in the first five seconds of the song. I concede that they are my auditory hallucinations and in no way constitute what I speculate they do, but here is what I am hearing between the cues 03 and 07 seconds.

I hear the word chutiya at 03, followed by what sounds like benchod and ending with bokachoda thrice. Let me reiterate that I am not for a moment suggesting that that is what Mos Def is saying. I am saying it is I who is imagining it. Hence the caveat “No offense meant” at the top of this post. But what if these three words slipped in without anyone realizing what they mean?

I am sure most of my South Asian readers know what these words mean but for those who do not here is some explanation. Chutiya, which began as a street invective in India, is in my book now a profoundly literary expression whose breadth and depth, and indeed effect, is unmatched by any other word. The word is derived from chut meaning cunt. Although the English equivalent is used to describe a contemptible person, in Hindi it can mean any number of things in any number of situations depending on how you intone it.

I have a friend who thinks he can get a PhD in chutiyapa since he has studied the use of the expression in different social situations for decades. That story, some other time. But chutiya broadly means a combination of a dunce, dumbass, contemptible, irritating, ridiculous, jerk, foolish person. I can expand the list much more but you get the drift. The word benchod in Hindi and many other South Asian languages means sisterfucker and bokachoda in the Bengali language means a dumbfucker.

I have to be a true-blue chutiya to be writing this at 5.30 in the morning.

April 15, 2010

Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar of The New York Times have a boilerplate story about the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious congregation in the world that takes place every 12 years in India. It is the sort of journal that is so generic that it can be used several times with the slightest bit of tinkering. But that is more a reflection on the event than the two reporters reporting it. The Kumbh Mela is somewhat like the universe—it is generally uniform.

What caught my attention though, as such Freudian passages always do, was this particular line in the story: “Shouting and singing, waving tridents or spears, the naked mystics, or naga sadhus, were granted the first plunge.” Naked men being granted the first plunge! Is it my smutty mind or there is some subliminal message here? Of course, there isn’t. This is what happens when you wake up at 4 a.m. and write your blog for no apparent reason.

In the particular context of the Kumbh Mela, it is a longstanding tradition that the naga sadhus get to take the ceremonial dip in the Ganga before tens of millions who have to wait their turn.

The naga sadhus are a uniquely Indian lifestyle whose practitioners are men who wear nothing more than disregard for the world they live in. At their purest the naga sadhus are supposed to lead a life of severe abnegation and many of them actually do. However, their popular image is one of men with matted hair who cover their bodies with vibhuti or sacramental ash/powder who occasionally smoke a joint. Some of them display such bizarre quirks as hanging a bunch of bricks from their penis. I would recommend that you use bricks for its more conventional purpose.

These men have a reputation of being extremely capricious but by and large they are the original hippies who have existed for centuries if not longer. Growing up I did witness the naga sadhus walking as part of a religious procession. What has stayed with me after all these years is that in Ahmedabad’s intense heat, which in those days used to melt the tar in the road, these men walked bare feet.

April 14, 2010

A suave diplomat returns to his home country after narrowly losing the election to the position of the United Nations General-Secretary. Back home, there are many attractive career options that beckon him. He chooses perhaps the most logical one – a life in politics.

He leverages his strong political network built over a couple of decades and manages to get nominated to contest a parliamentary seat. He wins handsomely. Fortunately for him so does the party which he is a member of. Quite inevitably, in the new government he is appointed the country’s junior foreign minister.

He is outspoken and tech-savvy, the two least admired attributes in a diplomat. He takes to Twitter with such natural ease that it surprises even the founder of the microblogging site. In no time he builds up a following in excess of half a million people and rising. His tweets are avidly followed much to the chagrin his more dour, traditional and reticent boss, the country’s foreign minister. There are occasional skirmishes between the two men. There is often talk of the junior foreign minister losing his job but the country’s prime minister stands by him.

Then one day the junior foreign minister decides that it is time for some of his friends to hitch a ride on the bandwagon of a highly lucrative form of cricket. Using his good offices he helps structure a bid for a franchise of the cricket league. Among the people who are part of the winning consortium is a young woman who is a close friend and possibly future partner of the junior minister, if the media reports are to be believed. I mean the future partner bit because that she is a close friend has been confirmed by the politician himself.The young woman is reportedly given sweat equity worth millions without her having invested any money herself. The reasons behind the equity are a subject of wild speculations, most of which are of nudge-nudge and wink-wink variety.

The commissioner of the cricket league implies in one of his tweets that the minister was upfront about the identity of the members of the consortium that won the franchise. His tweet causes a firestorm. The country’s prime minister, traveling abroad to attend a summit on nuclear security, is asked whether he would sack the junior foreign minister. He says he will have to ascertain all the facts before any action.

As the junior minister as well as the young woman issue strong rejoinders denying any impropriety or wrong doing in the franchise deal, the plot takes a sinister turn. The minister gets a death threat via SMS essentially telling him to lay off the franchise. The threat is alleged to be from a member of perhaps the region’s most powerful criminal empire.

All this can easily pass off as a rough draft of a thriller except that every word of it is true.

April 13, 2010

As important as David Coleman Headley is to unraveling the November 26,2008 Mumbai terror attacks and any possible similar future plots, I find it a bit odd that he figured so prominently in the meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

It is undeniable that India has a direct and far more consequential interest in Headley than the United States. It is equally understandable that Indian investigators are exercised over not being able to conduct any direct interrogation of someone who has pleaded guilty to all 12 counts he was charged with in connection with the Mumbai case. Quite obviously, domestic political compulsions also demanded that Singh appeared personally seized of the matter.

Notwithstanding all of these compelling factors, there is still something incongruous about the two top leaders discussing a specific case.The Obama-Singh meeting took place on Sunday on the sidelines of the nuclear security summit that the US president has convened. It is true that in many ways the Headley case has become emblematic of how bilateral relations actually work on the ground beyond the lofty verbiage of bilateral treaties such as the extradition treaty between the two countries.

India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told journalists that Obama "was fully supportive of our request for provision" of access to Headley, adding " that they were working through their legal system on the issue." While it is extraordinary for a US president to offer support in a specific criminal case, it is not clear what it is he can actually do in tangible terms. I am not much conversant with the American judicial system but I doubt whether the president can intervene in any way, shape or form in such cases and make any binding commitments of cooperation.

That India will be given access to Headley after some effort is now inevitable. It will be a qualified and controlled access as I have been reporting for sometime now. I am sure Indian investigators know well that access does not automatically mean that Headley will offer highly valuable and immediately actionable intelligence about any future terror plots. He is unlikely to tell the Indians what he has not already shared with the Americans. So any interrogation of Headley is likely to be reiteration and reaffirmation of what is already known to India.

There is no way President Obama can prevail on Attorney-General Eric Holder to do anything more than what Holder has already assured India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram of doing.

So I come back to my original point. What then was the point of Headley being escalated to the highest levels of the two countries’ leaderships? At best it should have been discussed at the level of the two national security advisers. Once Headley finds out, which I suspect he may already have through his lawyers, that he is now a subject of summit level talks between India and the United States he could derive some vicarious satisfaction out of it. In his trade such notoriety is a badge of honor.

April 12, 2010

I have it on fairly good authority that Raj Patel is indeed “Maitreya”. My “exhaustive” research lasting an intense five minutes and drawn from such sources as Wikipedia and www.rajpatel.org has thrown up clinching evidence that the followers of Share International are not misguided in thinking that Raj Patel is indeed who the group’s founder Benjamin Crème has prophesized to be.

So far I have only one exhibit to offer you. And that is the visual comparison above.On the left is what Maitreya might have looked like according to Tibetan Buddhist traditions and on the right is what Patel indeed looks like. I must say that resemblance is uncanny.

For those of you who may not know about him Raj Patel is a writer, activist and academic who has gained considerable attention because of his recent books such as “The Value of Nothing”, “Stuffed and Starved”, “Promised Land” and “Food Rebellions.”

Patel finds himself in an extraordinary situation of being hailed, worshipped, feted, and fawned over as “Maitreya”, who is a sort of bodhisattva or the enlightened one according to Buddhist traditions. To his credit Patel has strenuously denied that he is “Maitreya.”

Here is how Patel describes it in The Guardian, “I mention this first because earlier this year a trickle, and then a flood, of email asked whether I was, in fact a prince. Specifically, people asked whether I was Maitreya – The World Teacher – a prince of peace, the leader of a movement that might be able to save the planet from itself. Others wrote to ask whether I was the antichrist, the Prince of Darkness.

As the Guardian reported, the deluge began after a number of coincidences seemed to match me up with the man foretold by followers of a group called Share International, founded by Scottish mystic Benjamin Crème. I'd done little to earn the title of Maitreya, though I admit some parallels between my life and that described in the prophecy.”

I was amused to see how Patel, who is a serious academic and respected scholar on development issues, has obliquely kept the possibility of indeed being “Maitreya” open even while closing it. “I'd done little to earn the title of Maitreya, though I admit some parallels between my life and that described in the prophecy,” he says.

Quite predictably this whole nonsensical story may now be headed for Hollywood.

April 11, 2010

India is expected to step up the pressure for the extradition of Mumbai terror plotter David Coleman Headley on the US despite a plea bargain agreement in Chicago that precludes it in return for a guilty plea.

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Washington to attend President Barack Obama’s multilateral summit on global nuclear security, one of the subjects of his delegation’s bilateral agenda will be Headley’s extradition.

It is not yet clear whether Singh will personally raise the subject with Obama when the two meet today. However, India’s National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon will do so when he meets his US counterpart General (Retd) James Jones.

The Indian media quoted unnamed official sources as saying, "We will keep pushing...This will be one of the issues...We'll use every occasion to seek access (to Headley)."

It is undeniable that what is partly prompting New Delhi to press for Headley’s extradition is domestic political criticism that the Singh government is not taking a firmer stand on the issue even though the key plotter of the Mumbai attacks is of great consequence in India. Headley was charged with and has pleaded guilty to in connection with the deaths of six American nationals. That fact, in US perspective, takes primacy over his larger involvement in the overall planning of the November, 2008 attacks.

It is difficult to see how India will be able to convince the US to disregard the plea bargain which expressly takes extradition as well as the death penalty off the table. I would not be surprised if the pressure at the highest level is being brought as part of a strategy to eventually compel Washington to let Indian investigators to have unfettered and even unscripted access to Headley.

Since I have been following this case from the beginning I know for a fact that Headley’s attorney John Theis will insist not only on his presence during any interrogation by the Indians but even impose specific ground rules. It would be interesting to see how the two sides work this one out without embarrassing the other.